Page 18 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

INTRODUCTION 7

FOR A RECONSTRUCTION
Any consideration of Habermas’s analysis of the bourgeois public
sphere must take into account that his study emanates from the
Frankfurt School tradition of Critical Theory. This gives the concept its
historical concreteness as well as its intellectual specificity.
Methodologically, this means that Habermas’s work incorporates
elements of critique. By this I mean basically the analytic process
whereby the seeming facticity of a phenomenon (i.e. the bourgeois
public sphere), as well as the conceptual categories by which this
phenomenon is grasped (e.g. ‘opinion’, ‘citizen’, ‘voting’), are probed
to reveal their historical conditions and limits. This is done with the aim
of an emancipatory interest.
In other words, Habermas first examines the bourgeois public sphere,
not by accepting its definition of itself, but by elucidating the historical
circumstances which make it possible and, eventually, also impossible.
Then he strives to establish the conditions which account for the social
origins and functioning of the discrepancy between the conceptual
categories used in the discourse about the public sphere and the actual
social relations and value relations which are at work. In short, he
highlights its illusory or ideological component; he examines both what
is socially accomplished by the discrepancy and what is at stake in its
revelation. It is in this sense that his method can be said to be critical.
The Frankfurt School’s version of critique was an
intellectual milestone, not least for the area of media analysis (cf. Negt
1980). However, this does not mean we should treat their analyses as an
orthodoxy. Such canonicalness would only create an impasse and would
in fact be contrary to the logic of critique itself. It is much more fruitful
to integrate a general notion of critique with an overall approach to the
human sciences generally and the media in particular, not least where
issues of ideology arise (cf. Thompson 1990). Critique, the critical
moment or dimension of analysis and research, then becomes one of
several necessary dimensions, along with what can be termed the
empirical, the interpretive and the reflexive. The particular research task
and interests at hand must decide the ratio between these dimensions.
The critical moment is thus neither exhaustive nor exclusive. Moreover,
we have come to see that there are even conceptual limitations to its
liberatory project (cf. Fay 1987, Benhabib 1986).
The knowledge which critique generates points to contingencies, yet
also to possibilities: to change and to human intervention in a social
world whose human origins are often not recognizable. (In this regard